This Episode's Guest

Bikino Ildephonse

Transcript

Chris:

Alright, we're here at the DrupalCon Sprint day. Going behind the screens with Bikino and you just set up your local environment with Drupal 8, and using Ddev, here at Sprint day, and now you're getting ready to help out on the issue queue. So give us a little introduction about yourself and how your DrupalCon's gone so far.

Bikino:

Yeah, thank you. Thank you Chris. My name is Bikino Ildephonse. I go on Bikilde on my Drupal site username. I'm coming from Rwanda, and it's the middle of Africa. We are starting the Drupal, Drupal community in Rwanda, it's really at the early stage, but I'm doing web development using Drupal.

Chris:

Do you do back-end development, or front-end development primarily? Or a little of both?

Bikino:

It's like I'm doing both, I'm combining both. The only third party I need is someone who may be working on the content.

Chris:

And so is this your first DrupalCon, or have you been to one before?

Bikino:

Well, this is my second one. I went to New Orleans in 2016.

Chris:

How has your experience been here in Nashville this week?

Bikino:

I can say that it's really wonderful because I participate in the New Orleans one, I just go to set up and all the organizations. You know, just because the event is too big, it has so many sessions around. Now I was much more organized than the last one. Yeah, and I got opportunity to go to specific sessions, as well as going to the Sprint to try some things, and it really works.

Chris:

Excellent, so you were able to take that knowledge from your first DrupalCon, and realize there's so much to do, get it organized, and get your priorities straight for this one.

Bikino:

Yeah, it helps me a lot because I used my previous experience and I got more, I prepared before coming to make sure that I know where I have to go, and to choose the best sessions that may interest me.

Chris:

Is there one particular session that you really felt was beneficial to you this time?

Bikino:

Yeah, I attended different ones, but this one person who was sharing her experience on how she decided to quit the job, to quit the job, resigned the job and go to work for herself. She was sharing the experience on how she attended the camps to learn new stuff, and go successful, so it was really inspiring.

Chris:

Excellent. I love when you can find a good session that inspires you like that. It's not just the technical knowledge, but something more you can take with you.

Bikino:

Yeah.

Chris:

So tell me a little bit about the work that you do in Rwanda and the team members that you work with.

Bikino:

Thank you. In Rwanda, I work for FHI360. It's international and you're working in so many different countries. But in particular in Rwanda, we have been permitting a lot of projects called Teacher Come To Practice. We build a big education portal that is going to take people to ... from all the peer landing and best practice sharing that medium has the forums and also the library. So we use Drupal on that and it has so many Drupal features including taxonomy and also the forums.

Chris:

Wow, that's incredible. How many people are you working with on these projects?

Bikino:

The project in Rwanda, its actually ended but it was like not really big, as we were about 13 including the administration, but we have the backup from the home office in the United States.

Chris:

So you came here to the Sprints today to learn how to ... what was your primary goal, actually, for coming to the Sprints today? What was the one, what's one thing you wanted to learn today?

Bikino:

Well, thank you. First of all, I'm doing the ... I'm building the local Drupal community in my country and it's really at the early stages, but I was much interested to come back into the Sprint to learn how the process works as I'm so much interested in taking from here to my community. And see how I can get so many of my local partners or Rwandans to be part of this and contribute on such kind of a noble cause as an open source initiative. And ... you know ... I was also, I was also much interested to come and see how so many people can sit, sit in different places and work on one product, which is Drupal. And from that I wanted to learn that experience and take it as a best practice to my ... My goal is to have Rwandans contributing on Drupal. I believe that through contributions they would learning a lot and many, I guess many people who are contributing are also benefiting from Drupal in other ways.

Chris:

That's excellent. That's a really great story that you can be able to take that to your community and be able to teach everything that you are learning here. And, so you told me earlier before we started recording that you ran into Gábor Hojtsy and he was able to help you with some of the translations; so tell me a little bit about how that went and what you can do now with the translation interface?

Bikino:

Yeah, thank you. We participated in different activities, especially in Drupal Developer training days as I said. And, we have ... as I'm starting to build a community, a local community, we have two projects on the table. One is translating Drupal into Kinyarwanda and I expressed my interest on the Drupal.org. But I really want to do it and through different interesting channels that Drupal is using, I got ... I found that Gábor is the right person. I pushed to him an email requesting to make me admin on that group, Rwanda team, just because I found it dormant and not active. I want it to be activate so that I can mobilize the local people and then we do contribution. I went through hard process, the instructions as it requires online by posting a request on the forum, on the group waiting for the admin to respond and posting an issue there. It requires like two weeks to get. So if you don't get it, it goes to another level.

Bikino:

So I was lucky to meet Gábor on this particular, Nashville DrupalCon, and he immediately helped me. He made me admin for Drupal, for localization Drupal as well as a group for Rwanda, so this is really helpful. It's going to help me. I already tried out and pushed a confirmed one to Kinyarwanda. I already have some other translations which were not yet approved. But as I was testing after getting rights from Gábor, it immediately got there and you can see it's somehow much vetted. So I'm expected to have so many words with my colleagues in Rwanda during this year, 2018.

Chris:

That's amazing that you can now have access to go in there and create Drupal in Rwanda. Drupal Core can be translated and I know that's not the right ... say the name of the language that you speak?

Bikino:

Kinyarwanda

Chris:

Kinyarwanda

Bikino:

Kinyarwanda

Chris:

Kinyarwanda. I'm probably gonna keep screwing that up so I won't try saying that anymore. Thanks.

Bikino:

You learn a lot about Rwanda and have so much interesting stuff. So I'm happy that you followed up and learned more about Rwanda. And, I take this opportunity to also thank you, Chris, for your support. All the steps in which it requires to learn to Sprint. I really went through it and feel confident that I can now start contributing.

Chris:

Thank you very much. That's excellent. It's always fun for me to help somebody get started and watch their progress, and you have everything installed now. And I feel like you've learned a lot about the process and you can go in and now you have access to do the translations as well. So, I have a feeling, I feel like you have a lot you can bring back to Rwanda and help your colleagues.

Bikino:

Yeah, and also it's like we are also in touch, it's not ending here. We have so all of those channels, Slack and so on, and the groups on the Drupal.org. I'm sure I'll be getting much support from you.

Chris:

Oh, absolutely.

Bikino:

Yeah.

Chris:

So if you could give one piece of advice to somebody who's not sure whether they're right to come to the Sprints or are maybe a little intimidated? What's one thing you would offer to them as a piece of advice?

Bikino:

Thank you. I would say one, or like to summarize this, I would say that Drupal community is really becoming everywhere. You feel at home and you feel confident that you can ... it's like everything is important and any contribution is really well here in Drupal community. I would advise whoever interested in building his career, expanding the connections, and also learning from others to get interested and attend such kind of conference. And specifically, on the Sprint, I would say that it's really important and really useful to try to, it's simple, but it's better if you go through the Drupal dot com and get some, read something, so that you can come with a little knowledge. That can help you to use your time, your time, and get to so many things.

Chris:

That's excellent advice. So, I'd like to know a little bit more about you as well. And I usually ask the question: if you woke up tomorrow and the internet was gone, no more Drupal, no more internet, what would you do? What do you like to do in your spare time/in your free time?

Bikino:

Thank you. First of all, I'm so much attached to my family. All the time I get, like free time, I do many things that can really make my family happy, including taking my kids to some places where they can have fun, but also when we have the ... we have the society that's really quiet. We have so many social events where we go and visit friends. And my hobbies I do play karate. That's my hobby, that's my sport. Otherwise, I'm so much attached to the computer. Any time I have free time, I start playing with keyboard.

Chris:

Yeah, excellent. And finally is there somebody you would like to say thank you to or share some gratitude with who's maybe convinced you you should go to DrupalCon or has helped you along the way somewhere?

Bikino:

I would say that, first of all, I would say that ... when I say Drupal, I always think about Dries, I can say ... I can say thank you, thank you to him. And thanks to him because he lets Drupal be an open source. And secondly, I would really want to, to say thank you to anyone who contributed, who supported, supported my trip to come here to attend this session. It's really motivating. I have so much to take back so I am appreciative of Drupal Association as well as any other sponsors of the event that contributed to make my trip and every other trips like this on sponsorship program, like this one. It's really helpful and I would say that it's the best way of showing people an expanding Drupal community all around the world.

Chris:

Thanks. Well thanks for taking a few minutes to talk today. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Bikino:

Thank you too, Chris for your interest and for your heart and hope we keep in touch.